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Nelson Algren, The Art of Fiction No. 11

Interviewed by Alston Anderson & Terry Southern

Issue 11, Winter 1955

Nelson Algren, 1955.

The interview took place in a dark and untidy Greenwich Village walk-up flat in the fall of 1955. A number of visitors dropped in to listen to Algren. Word had spread that he was giving an interview, and in that quarter of the city Algren is highly respected.

He makes his living writing, has no set routine for working at it, nor seriously feels the need of one; he finds that he works best, or most frequently, at night, and he composes on the typewriter. He strikes one as a man who feels and means just what he says, and often says it in the same way he dresses—with a good-humored nonchalance that is at once uniquely American and, in the latter-day sense, quite un-American: his tie, if he ever wore one, would very likely be as askew as his syntax often is. He is a man who betrays no inclination whatsoever towards politeness, but he has a natural generosity and compassion. To talk with Algren is to have a conversation brought very quickly to that rarefied level where values are actually declared.

INTERVIEWER

Did you have any trouble getting The Man with the Golden Arm published?

NELSON ALGREN

No, no. Nothing was easier, because I got paid before I wrote it. It got a very lucky deal because they had an awful lot of money, the publishers did, during the war. Doubleday had a big backlog. I was working for Harper’s—that is, I’d done one novel. Under the way they operate—well, it’s a very literary house; I mean, they’d give you, oh, maybe a five-hundred-dollar advance and then you’re on your own. And then if the book goes on two years—well, but I mean, you take the risk. They pay in literary prestige, they have an editor who once edited something by Thomas Wolfe or something; they figure that way. And I didn’t see it, just didn’t know what the score was, you see. So a guy from Doubleday came along, and I said what I wanted was enough to live on by the week for a year. And he said, “what do you call enough to live on?” and I said, “Fifty dollars,” which seemed like a lot to me then—and he said, “Well, how about sixty dollars for two years?” He raised it himself, see; I mean, they were author-stealing, of course, and ah—well, I had a very bad contract at Harper’s anyhow. So they gave me that sixty-a-week deal for two years, which was very generous then, and—I told them I was going to write a war novel. But it turned out to be this Golden Arm thing. I mean, the war kind of slipped away, and these people with the hypos came along—and that was it. But they had so much money it was fantastic. It’s very hard to get out of the habit of thinking you’re going to kill them if you ask for fifty a week.

INTERVIEWER

Which of your books sold the most?

ALGREN

That was the only book that sold. The others never sold much except in paperbacks.

INTERVIEWER

Do you think of The Man with the Golden Arm as being very autobiographical?

ALGREN

Oh, to some extent I drew on some people I knew in a half way. I made some people up and ah . . . the “Dealer” was . . . sort of a mixture; I got two, I dunno, two, three guys in mind. I know a couple guys around there. I knew one guy especially had a lot of those characteristics, but it’s never clearly one person.

INTERVIEWER

Well, anyway, you do think of some one person who could have started you thinking about Frankie Machine, since, apparently, you had at first planned an entirely different book.

ALGREN

The only connection I can make is . . . well, I was thinking about a war novel, and I had a buddy—little Italian bookie—pretty good dice-shooter, and he always used that phrase. We’d go partners—he’s a fairly good crap-shooter—I mean, he’s always good for about three passes. And then I’d say, “Pick it up, Joe, pick it up,” and he’d say, “Don’t worry, gotta golden arm.” Then he’d come out with a crap. He never picked it up at all— but that’s where I got that title. That was a guy I knew in the Army. It has no connection, it just happened to fit in later.

INTERVIEWER

How do you think you arrived at it thematically —rather than a war novel?

ALGREN

Well, if you’re going to write a war novel, you have to do it while you’re in the war. If you don’t do the thing while you’re there—at least the way I operate—you can’t do it. It slips away. Two months after the war it was gone; but I was living in a living situation, and . . . I find it pretty hard to write on anything in the past . . . and this thing just got more real; I mean, the neighborhood I was living in, and these people, were a lot more real than the Army was.

INTERVIEWER

What was the neighborhood you were living in?

ALGREN

Near Division Street.

INTERVIEWER

Was this one of those books that “wrote itself”?

ALGREN

No. No, it didn’t write itself. But I didn’t have to contrive it. I mean, the situation hits you and you react to it, that’s all.